The Ukrainian Violin Concerto

By Virko Baley

The three violin concertos on this disc represent a specific tradition in Ukrainian music of the second half of the 20th century. The "generation of the sixties" in Ukraine produced two distinct styles: music of highly abstract nature, that grew out of the experience of the European avant-garde (the so-called "Kiev avant-garde) and music that can be described as "the new folklorism", the precursor of "new romanticism", a movement that reached its full development in the 1980s. To a lesser or greater extent, it was a continuation of the socialist realism school, represented at its best by such composers as Shostakovich and Prokofiev, but now transformed by the example of the modernists into a more individual language of new romanticism. The three composers on this disc, Shtoharenko, Hubarenko and Skoryk rejected the avant-garde aesthetics to different degrees, but accepted a number of the modernist positions, especially Skoryk.